


The Heir

by jackmarlowe



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Casual Sex, F/F, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, King's Own, M/M, Queer Families, baby gay Kel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:08:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25081399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: Men like Raoul of Goldenlake do not have daughters, but his squire is more like him than either of them know.Scenes across Kel's time with the King's Own.
Relationships: Keladry of Mindelan & Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie's Peak, Keladry of Mindelan/Original Female Character(s), Raoul of Goldenlake and Malorie's Peak & Flyndan Whiteford
Comments: 12
Kudos: 74





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in a very long time, for me; revisiting my favourite YA for some comfort reading and I guess a little re-intro to writing and fell back into some Themes in Kel and Raoul's relationship, so here we are! Posting to try and kick myself into continuing.

‘It’s a bad, bad idea the desert’s working into your head. You’ll see when we hit water next.’

This was the third time this week and Raoul was tired in his bones the way usually only abstract, non-working things like the idea of war with Scanra or hearing healers talk about the intricacies of surgery-magic made him feel. He huffed a sigh and pushed hands through his black curls, peering vaguely at the cracked little tent mirror without really letting his eyes focus. The afternoon was punishingly hot, worse by the day as they approached the south and their season with the Bazhir; yesterday’s breeze had gone and left them with a gaunt, angry local anvil-god.

Flyn was watching him from the bedroll, his gaze fierce and palpable.

‘Maybe I’m tired of you bringing it up,’ Raoul suggested.

‘Because, what – it’s a _noble_ matter?’

‘Mithros,’ he snapped, and gave up on trying to get his hair looking anything other than off the back of fourteen hours’ riding. ‘Because it’s not a question of logistics, or the _glory and honour of the Own_ , or how many gods-blest horses need reshoeing by the week’s end-’

‘Raoul,’ Flyn said flatly. Time was – over a decade ago, now, but still – he wouldn’t have used his first name and the odd right familiarity of it still hit him a peculiar way.

Raoul glared at him finally. His second lay with his hands behind his head and his broad shoulders tense for an argument, stubble rising on his square jaw and red curls dark and slicked straight at the temples from the heat even with the tent flap loose. He looked a picture despite the road and it irked.

‘You don’t have the clout you think you do, in court. Too much of what you’ve made the Own into means putting on a good public face, more than being Their Majesties’ friend in private – not that you’ve not done the work, _all of it_ ,’ Flyn cut in, pushing himself up onto his elbows and shaking his head when Raoul opened his mouth mulishly. ‘Aye, now – you know where the credit’s due, and I’m giving it! But this ain’t flattery, either – I’m not being soft with you. I’m saying what I’d tell any Lord Commander who I’d spent fifteen years alongside building up a summer knights’ holiday into a proper fighting force, something that Their Majesties can tell the conservatives to get stuffed over whenever they come copper-grubbing. _Reliably_.’

Raoul felt a sneer rising that felt too much like his father’s for him to bear long; he snorted and twisted his mouth. ‘You’ve got quite the opinion of Jon and Thayet’s priorities.’

‘I’ve got an informed one.’ Flyn stretched his arms above his head and twisted his riding-sore shoulders from one side to the next, keeping his eyes fixed on him guardedly. ‘I write the year’s reports, same as you.’

He contemplated pacing briefly, but it was too hot and the exhaustion – though they’d both slept, a little, in the hottest part of the day after the Own settled down their horses – was creeping up to his eyes. With a saddle-born grunt, Raoul let himself fold into a cross-legged slump on the hard-packed dirt floor. Flyn tossed him the waterskin and he pulled from it irritably.

‘You know I’ve no quarrel with the Queens’ Riders-’

‘Oh, I _knew_ you’d say something like that,’ Raoul groaned, stretching his own big torso up until he felt his spine cracking. ‘Gods, Flyndan! What is it with you? Was it your mother’s fondest wish you’d been born a girl? What possible cursed thing-’

‘They’ll say you’re bedding her!’ Flyn snapped, pink rising in his cheeks.

‘And you’re – what, jealous?’ Raoul shook his head wryly, pushing his tongue behind his teeth. ‘Wrong sort of court gossip for you, milady?’

‘Don’t be _twelve years old!_ ’

‘That’s what _she_ is, nearly, though my lord Wyldon says she’d put a hand on since last we were in Corus.’ The letter was baking gently in his leather saddlebags just outside the tent; the training master had never _hinted_ at anything in his life but Keladry of Mindelan’s name was there, carefully sandwiched between two boys who he know by fief only, as some of the few new squires destined for palace service by the summer’s end. Raoul pushed his hands through his hair and dragged them down through his dark beard, grimacing at the sweat and grime lingering despite the cat’s-paw wash he’d had before they slept. ‘I’d be some kind of knight-master, unable to resist taking my child-squire to bed a week into her training.’

‘You wouldn’t be the first one,’ Flyn muttered darkly, and this Raoul had to concede – there had been enough boys from his own page-years with stories.

They were quiet for a bit, the burly captain finally dropping his gaze to flick a subconscious count of the weapons in view – a real bandit habit, Raoul had started teasing him when they were in better, fonder moods and cooler climes. A horse complained on the far side of camp and someone shouted, sun-irritable rather than an alarm. In the ragged circle of brush just downhill of the little encampment, cicadas keened sluggishly into an afternoon round. It vaguely occurred to Raoul that he hadn’t washed his shirt in two weeks – he’d stopped noticing a smell on either of them.

He really would take her, he realised. It was an old thought, one he hadn’t articulated to Flyn at the time, though those of the Own who spent time in the palace training grounds had seen enough of Page Keladry over the last four years to talk of her. Alanna had said, too, at Midwinter, and he knew she’d say it again come the season’s end and their return to Corus. But Wyldon’s letter at the Own’s setting off had really reminded him – not a nudge, per se, but the realisation that the end of summer would begin a new year for the unclaimed squires at the palace. Maybe it said he was getting old, if he’d finally stopped measuring time by that slow slip towards dread and anticipation as the days cooled. That, he supposed dully, or war really was here, if the Own had spent enough years out in the field to disrupt the old rhythms of Midwinter calling-in and harvest feasting.

But he would take her. His first squire in twenty years. Teaching again and making strategy into the smaller, cleaner words that had made him realise he was good at it. The decision sat cool and right in him and straightened his spine enough that the knots in his back loosened. Flyn, tired of waiting, looked at him and saw it, and made a small strained noise through his teeth.

‘I’d hope you’d think on it,’ he said quietly. ‘At least to seem like you were humouring me.’

‘No,’ Raoul said, not unkindly. ‘No, I don’t think so. You know me better than that.’

Months ago, this would’ve felt dramatic and signalled a clear, hackle-raising rank-based dismissal; months before that, when Raoul had been a better Commander, they would not be here, sprawled out together tired and tangled and getting on one another’s nerves unbuttoned like this. Flyn had assured him, at the start of this march, that this would not be a resumption of their stupid, fraught, exceedingly brief romance of six summers ago – and that had held in earnest, amicably and comfortably with some good evenings on the road, though he’d been a divine idiot to slide into it in the first place. This felt like habit, the heavy kind he’d worked hard to look in the eye. It did not sit well between the people in command.

Speaking it aloud would’ve been better – the kind of responsibility and humble self-discipline he might be expected to model as a knight-master, if the gods saw fit to remind him how not to put his foot in it. But Flyn had already lain down tight-lipped and overheated on Raoul’s bedroll, and so the Lord Commander sighed and pushed himself up with effort to slip from the tent and go elsewhere for a while. They would talk about it and Flyn would take it personally, but only a little, and not as much as he appeared to take Keladry of Mindelan. He would have to get used to that, hissed Alanna in his ear.

Maybe, Raoul thought as he trudged aimlessly towards his mare in the over-bright haze, this was how he measured his getting older now: these days he only had room for one bad idea at a time, desert or no.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raoul tries diplomacy in squire-matters with Alanna the Lioness. It's all a bit complicated.
> 
> Set just before the first chapter of Squire.

Wyldon’s hand was practically a parody of the training master – sharp, precise, each _f_ perfectly consistent from one summer to the next and yet irrefutably not a scribe. _Nealan of Queenscove_ occasionally cut a jagged, irritated line across the page; it made Raoul grin as he leafed through and handed the second-year report to Alanna. She had the Knight Commander’s desk and he, as usual, was more comfortable sprawled out on the floor, pebbles from the tiltyard keeping the occasional gasp of a July breeze at bay.

‘ _Arrogant, entitled, and hopeless at staff-work_ ,’ Alanna read aloud, kicking her riding boots up on the desk. They’d gone for a hunt, entirely unsuccessful, earlier in the day, as they always did to recover their old easiness after months apart.

‘Mud,’ he reminded her; she shot him a sceptical glance over the top of the page.

‘And when was the last time you washed, O Hero of the Ponies?’

‘You lost your manners on the borders,’ Raoul informed her primly. He shifted his weight on the floor and briefly considered getting a carpet – a _carpet_ , like he was retiring to his simple holdfast. Still, it was one of the many comforts the Bazhir did better, along with tailored saddles and an easy, open-ended approach to arranged marriage.

Alanna bared her teeth cat-like and absent as she scanned the rest of Wyldon’s report. She wore a black tunic like the palace armourers’, a deliberate and doomed attempt to side-step court news that she was back; she’d also cropped her hair short for the first time in years. Out of the corner of his eye and with few recent points of reference for her mood she could be Alan again, grown up and reclining in his chair.

It was easier to imagine the two of them as new squires than this – _wobbling into parenthood_ , was how he was beginning to think of it. He did paperwork more often than the King’s Champion and she approached this work with her own mix of stubborn impatience, but thinking this through in the abstract was hard. He remembered their own summer after the big exams vividly – Alan flighty and bad-tempered in the training yard, teaching him to roll his hips back when fighting a smaller opponent on foot. Raoul himself at fifteen, sore and dry-mouthed in a tavern, tugging his tunic over the hose that marked him as belonging to the palace while he learned how to look for men who looked at him in some same, secret way.

Wyldon’s reports on Keladry of Mindelan’s progress treated her much in this kind of difficult abstract. Six weeks after her taking her place at the squires' table, she still came across on the page as a girl her betters wanted to keep a poorly packaged state secret. Raoul had never taken the Stump – Jon had gotten the nickname via Roald, and it stuck wonderfully – for a diplomat, but his language was the mincing, careful dance he’d learned to associate with Gary’s growing up. _Progress with the staff noted. Housing arrangements adjusted due to reports of interference with probationary page’s quarters. Master Oakbridge confirms adequate performance at Midwinter Festival._

Head propped up in his hand and hip digging into the hardwood floor, Raoul could feel Alanna’s hot purple gaze on him as he thumbed through to the training master’s assessment of the big examinations. This was the bit he’d never gotten used to as they grew into adulthood – this delicacy between them. He’d learned to expect it from Jon, but not her.

He cleared his throat, not looking up at her. ‘ _Page Keladry demonstrates exceptional, studied skill with pole-arms. Graduation to small-target tilting in second year as a non-probationary page. Evidence of weighted weapons use beginning with the lance and consistently good mounted work passed to examiners_. _A considerable talent._ ’

‘He'll sacrifice full sentences if it means he doesn't have to say _her_ ,’ Alanna commented flatly. ‘Still. He can’t compliment her and call her a girl in the same pen-stroke. I _told_ Jon – washed up, conservative, lance so far up his arse it gives him what he thinks is his backbone. I’ll be surprised if there’s another girl in my lifetime, with him in charge.’

Raoul hummed, tracing Wyldon’s signature absently as he pushed himself upright and beckoned for Nealan of Queenscove’s file. ‘Or she’s made the new mould, lady knight. She’s taller than you.’

‘I’m sure she was when she was twelve,’ Alanna scoffed, her lightness belying what Raoul knew to be four expensive years’ worth of spycraft worthy of her husband amongst the palace tailors and armourers. She slid her boots off his desk with a little sprinkle of dried mud and tossed him the file.

Raoul caught it and held it without opening it. He finally looked up: Alanna’s purple eyes deep-cut with sleepless bruises, her shoulders hunched.

‘She’s the decent rider,’ he said carefully, and instantly regretted his own bad gesture to diplomacy – her compact face had gone narrow and odd.

‘You want her.’

He paused and set Queenscove’s papers down. Wyldon’s handwriting now dappled most of his office floor. ‘Well, yes.’

Alanna pushed her tongue behind her teeth and said nothing. It was easy for her to look suddenly very tired – Raoul hadn’t noticed it before, this slip she did into something grey and uncharacteristically vague. Talk was the Lioness, with her temper and her Gift and her profound lack of convention, liked exile. Raoul had always loyally interpreted this as her penchant for old-fashioned knight-work, the kind of heroic, intellectualised challenges and long journeys that lost his own attention and conviction without the busy, busy of managing three companies. He was also under no illusion about the specific, pressing weights that’d hung off her armour since the taps on their shoulders that had made them knights; but this felt different occupying her body here, in this busy little room with papers between them. It was like Alanna was lonely and he'd only just noticed.

‘I don’t want to dance around this with you,’ he said quietly. ‘Not that I’ve ever been particularly good at it.’

‘You are when you want to be.’

‘Not like – oh, I don’t know. Like Jon is. He’ll see it as a compromise, the one he wants. As though we’ve handled it for him the way he likes to think we do.’

She nodded wordlessly, taking in a little rushed breath.

‘This is what _I_ want. I’m very, very clear on that for myself.’ Raoul crossed his legs and pushed his fingertips together, keeping their eyes level. ‘The whole ride home – and then the whole ride and back to Tusaine, with the ogres in between-’

‘You still need to tell me about that,’ she cut in quietly, the smallest edges of a small curling her mouth. Raoul took this reassurance with a smirk and plunged on.

‘I was making a list of what _books_ I wanted her to read. Books! Like I’m a thousand years old or seen the inside of a library some time this season – as if _she’d_ be putting her nose in half the things I thought up, when Wyldon says she’s only one for mathematics! And we – talked about this, I know, a little last winter,’ he conceded, ‘but more about you worrying over her. Negotiating your own relationship and knowing when you’ll be allowed. I respect that, Alanna-’ Raoul paused and shook his head. ‘Gods, that’s not the right word, I don’t know – I know you hate me being earnest but I grieve that for you. When I wrote to you about that spidren hunt-’

She rolled her eyes and huffed a breath. ‘Goddess, I hate when you’re chivalrous. Now who’s dancing around?’

‘All right, all right, yes – it just doesn’t seem like a coincidence, us talking so _serious_ about squires this past year.’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘You got me thinking about it, truly – not Kel in particular, just-’

‘Parental instinct rearing its head?'

Oh, gods. ‘Maybe! I don’t know. We’re getting older-’

‘Oh, that's a _bad_ excuse,’ Alanna hissed, suddenly shifting back to bitter. ‘It’s our _duty_ , or some gods-curst something – it’s nothing to do with getting older. Jon would’ve asked this year or the next even if Keladry wasn’t in the mix royally mucking things up. Me for someone with the Gift, you-’

‘He wouldn’t ask me,’ Raoul said quietly, palms on his knees. ‘He knows I like my privacy.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Privacy, with a hundred unmarried men at your beck and call. And they say we benefit too much from royal privilege.’

‘He gave me his word he wouldn’t ever ask when he gave me the Own, Alanna.’ She didn’t tip him easily into a fight but Raoul could see how she did it so effortlessly, almost without trying, with court nobles who she knew couldn’t swing a sword; he let his voice be firm. ‘So when I tell you I want Kel as a squire, genuinely, believe it. The only permission I need is hers.’

Thunder rumbled sleepily between the layers of July heat outside, distant and dramatic. Alanna looked a little ready to strike, herself; she stood abruptly and went to the window.

‘Nealan of Queenscove,’ Raoul prompted, gentle but firm.

‘Nealan of Queenscove,’ she repeated. ‘She’s a friend of Keladry’s.’

He nodded – this had been emphasised early in Wyldon’s report, as if a judgement on her character. ‘Her probation-year sponsor. One of the ringleaders of that group, Jon says. He asked Roald.'

‘Yes. Baird told me.’

‘You don’t have to take him on,’ he tried, but she shook her head abruptly and turned to look at him.

‘George and I have been arguing – did you know that? About the time I spend away, and the children barely seeing anything of me.'

They hadn't talked about it recently, but Raoul nodded anyway. It felt odd to talk about George Cooper still – most things he and Alanna shared still came back to the palace, and George, for all his easy charm and the long hours Raoul had carved out to get to know him, kept his own court. She frowned and pushed her short hair back irritably with the habit of someone who was used to it longer. There was still no sign of the storm in the open window behind her, though the air felt heavier now and like it might rain.

‘It does have to be now, if I take a squire. Not that I _can’t_ – but I’d prefer it to be now, for practical and personal reasons, especially with someone I know wants to be a healer. To give me the routine and to serve my time. I just want to do this part exactly on my own terms.’

‘I understand that.’

‘Make sure _she_ understands that, Raoul – I’m serious.’

He resisted the impulse to leap up in agreement; he’d meant it when he said he didn’t need Alanna’s permission, though the taste of it made him feel much lighter, as though he’d worked her out again. ‘We did you wrong, treating you no different from the rest of the boys,’ he said quietly. ‘I know that very well, and not in the way Wyldon meant when he slapped her with that probation and Jon went along with it. I’ll meet her where she is. I want to.’

‘No, but _really_ -’ Alanna bit her lip and shook her head, surprising him with a sharp laugh. ‘If my future squire could see me talking about him like a consolation prize! I sound ungrateful – I’m not trying to be. We should go and speak to them.'

‘I doubt _he’ll_ be grateful once you’ve gotten him in the practice courts,’ Raoul drawled, finally drawing himself up to his feet. ‘He’ll be begging Kel for a trade by the end of the week.’

Alanna mirrored his gesture for Nealan of Queenscove’s file; he bent and folded it neatly back together before handing it to her. His friend pulled it to her chest and tilted her head at him. From his standing height, she suddenly looked very different from the Alan he’d known at the palace – stockier, sharper, balanced neat and unconscious on the balls of her feet the way knights who preferred to fight on foot did. ‘But you won’t have it,’ she said lightly, and this time her tone was free of a sword’s edge.

‘No,’ he said cheerfully, doing the full bow meant for royalty as he gestured towards the door. ‘There, my lady, Nealan of Queenscove is out of luck – but only there, I think.’

Alanna punched his arm as she swept past, and so they went to find their squires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the lovely comments and encouragement thus far! Still using this as a way back into writing and it's a bumpy ride – I really appreciate people reading.


End file.
